page_title: IA-64
section_title: Itanium 2: 2002–2010
hierarchical_section_title: IA-64 / History / Itanium 2: 2002–2010
caption_attribution_description: English: Intel Itanium 2 Processor 1.3GHz 3 MB Cache
context_page_description: IA-64 is the instruction set architecture of the Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard, and was evolved and then implemented in a new processor microarchitecture by Intel with HP's continued partnership and expertise on the underlying EPIC design concepts. In order to establish what was their first new ISA in 20 years and bring an entirely new product line to market, Intel made a massive investment in product definition, design, software development tools, OS, software industry partnerships, and marketing. To support this effort Intel created the largest design team in their history and a new marketing and industry enabling team completely separate from x86. The first Itanium processor, codenamed Merced, was released in 2001.
  The Itanium architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, in which the compiler decides which instructions to execute in parallel. This contrasts with superscalar architectures, which depend on the processor to manage instruction dependencies at runtime. In all Itanium models, up to and including Tukwila, cores execute up to six instructions per clock cycle.
context_section_description: The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002. It relieved many of the performance problems of the original Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by an inefficient memory subsystem.
  In 2003, AMD released the Opteron, which implemented its own 64-bit architecture (x86-64). Opteron gained rapid acceptance in the enterprise server space because it provided an easy upgrade from x86. Intel responded by implementing x86-64 (as Em64t) in its Xeon microprocessors in 2004.
  In November 2005, the major Itanium server manufacturers joined with Intel and a number of software vendors to form the Itanium Solutions Alliance to promote the architecture and accelerate software porting.
  In 2006, Intel delivered Montecito (marketed as the Itanium 2 9000 series), a dual-core processor that roughly doubled performance and decreased energy consumption by about 20 percent.
caption: Itanium 2 in 2003
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